Life-Poetry-Yoga (Vol 1)

9

You may remember my speaking to you of the difference between the "lonely" and the "solitary". Apropos of it I may dig up some lines that arose in me at the Samadhi at 5 p.m. on October 10. There was suddenly a pull from some profound within, threatening to take away whatever might be the dearest joy of one's days. I say "threatening" because that is how the pull seemed at first, but soon the sense of loss was gone and a recompense beyond one's highest hope was felt. Then the lines took shape:

Suddenly life's sweetest love was snatched away

To a veiled Within that gave no marvel back.

Then a strange silence found its final word:

"This paradise must swallow up all bliss,

Each smile and laugh and earth-intoxicate cry

Must plunge beyond its goldenest dream to a deep

Of heaven-honeyed loss, a void ever full,

Where sits the Solitary who is All,

Drunk with the infinitude of the One Self."

Now for the sentence Shraddhavan quoted from me to you: "Our past is the only thing we can change." Rather a cryptic and paradoxical pronouncement. The interpretations you have offered are valid and perhaps partake in their own ways of what I meant. You have written: "Our past is the only thing we can call ours and hold in our hands: the present is too slippery - one moment being the future and nearly the next the past. Since most of the time we are living unconsciously or with partial consciousness we see only the superficial part of any past, by exploring it more and more consciously we go on revealing to ourselves layer after layer or page after page and in the process of revelation of the ever new we may as well term it a change. Another approach would be to use the past to build a future as what the past

Page 62

could have been - this also amounts to changing it." My own meaning was as follows:

"The past's character depends on the nature of the present to which it has led. No matter how unlovely it may look, it can become beautiful if somehow the present gets touched by a glow from beyond the usual series of events, the normal chain of cause and effect. Realising the inadequacy, the wrong-headedness, the erring zigzag of times gone, we may awake keenly to the need of being different, the soul in us may stir to its creative sweet sadness at the sight of our life's and mind's missing of the true way, a light from our depths may suddenly leap out in response to the sense of frailty and futility in all that we have done. Then the past alters its whole aspect and grows a stepping-stone towards the Ideal. All its old appearance of a tale of mistakes and miseries and mischances, logically leading to nothing more than a variation on the same theme of the human, ail-too human, takes on a new significance and becomes - to put the matter in an extreme form - hell's hidden way to heaven. To let the past be what it has been to the outer consciousness or to transmute its lines and hues by giving them a novel denouement lies in our hands. And as the past is our only established and achieved possession in the process of time, it is the sole thing we have the power to reorientate by a spurt beyond our common selfhood. By such a spurt we begin to see behind all that has happened the secret Lover and Master manipulating the twists and turns of our life. A strange scheme emerges into view, everything falls into its proper place and all the scattered paths are found to come together and point to our true home that is the deep heart. At times what has impressed us as a graving in granite disperses like a mist: the entire past can vanish if the soul can give itself entirely to the Divine. The Mother has said that all Karma can be wiped out at a stroke by a sweeping self-dedication to the Divine. This would be a changing of the past in the most radical sense."

A word on some other topics. Yes, it is good to know

Page 63

what the Divine within wants to manifest. But we must beware of a too mental notion which would tell us merely what we want to be manifested. While being aware of one's main trend, it is best to lay one's complete being in the Mother's hands, asking her to manifest herself as fully as possible through us. She will know what we have to express. I think you are doing this well enough.

(6.1.1987)

You have asked me what provoked the lines of 10 October. They are linked to the poem "At Last" about the "Unfading Rose" which was written on 15 May 1986. The present "life-situation" was an extension of what became "finalised" then. The earlier phase was a psychic one: here is a deepening from or through the psychic into a sense of the Self - the ckaitya vurusha opening "backwards" into something of the Atman. I have mostly had in a very general manner the awareness-touch of a wide luminous tranquillity as the background of my being and, along with it, the frontal movement of a little soul offering its littleness to the Divine Beloved in a stream of sweet warmth. But this withdrawal through the "Unfading Rose", as it were, into a vastness as of some secret ever-still air was quite unusual. I am reminded in a small way of the Yoga of the Upanishads. This Yoga is, as a rule, taken to be an ancient Jnana Yoga, a Path of Knowledge through the discriminative mind. But, as Sri Aurobindo once pointed out to me, it was an entry into the Universal Self via the heart-purusha, the being "no bigger than the thumb of a man, who is like a fire without smoke and is the one who was in the past and is the lord of today and the lord of tomorrow". As soon as "the knot of the heartstrings" is "rent asunder" the "mortal" is said to "enjoy even in this body immortality." This "immortality" is twofold: the realisation of the inmost soul that never perishes and goes on growing through birth and death across the ages and the realisation of the single infinite Being who is unborn and

Page 64

undying and is "the immensity which alone is felicity."

I have sketched broadly the "life-situadon". The particularity attached to it may be seen as a pull inward beyond all objects of love, rending all ties and destroying the mortal music played on the heart-strings. Yet, in the swallowing up of its delight by an abyss ever-deepening, the cherished objects disappeared not into sheer nothingness but into the unlimited essence of their own selves. And this essence was at the same time touched with individuality and liberated into an All-ness. In a poem entitled "Ananda" many years ago occur lines that seem appropriate to the experience here as one to which the other which brought in the rose-image has led:

Rapture that cuts away time-transient shows

Like petals from the odour of a rose.

Now for a little turn away from myself. Your "jottings" interested me by the peeps they gave of your inner movements day after day. They have in places apt expressions matching the inner movements - "Legs may shake, stomach may flutter, chest may heave, but keep your hands uplifted firmly" - "Her promises wonderful and undeserved but taking too long to get fulfilled" - "I am the sea, the sea-gulls dipping for a fish, the moonbeam-fingertips dancing on wave-crests and suddenly dipping into the depths in between" - "touches of memory like whispers of eyelashes" -"And everywhere is Your name, Your expanse softly enclosing, pervading" - "empty interstellar space softly vibrated by self-revolving" - "it is self-eroticism, the Unmanifest tickling and then shivering and smiling and creating out of the joy and movement all manifestation for its own ecstasy" - "all of a sudden I realise that all I have achieved, all wonderful happenings and visions and day-dreams have been petals of Grace, drops of honey from heaven, chunks of moonbeams which somehow I plucked" - "sometimes I am a cloud looking from above and happy that soon I will come down and join earth, come down in drops, showers, even possibly torrents" - "the tussle between the old habit of mental

Page 65

control and control by the soul, mental discipline versus withholding of sanction by the Purusha is now near the surface, no more hidden" - "No more do I want to look from a mountain peak, that can never be tall enough and even it may be my vision is still limited, restricted. O, it is a joy to talk and pray and tell the Mother everything at least once a day and through Her loved ones whenever I write or talk to them."

(20.1.1987)

I see you are advising "patience" to yourself. Sri Aurobindo has asked for it too in the sense that we should realise how high and far the Supermind is and we should give ourselves time in order to gain Eternity instead of imagining or hoping that we can reach out to the Supreme in a few strides. It is also necessary to remember that the great planes have to be gradually climbed and we must beware of mistaking for them the surprising illuminations that occasionally come to us. In a number of letters Sri Aurobindo has warned enthusiastic or ambitious sadhaks against fancying they have penetrated into the Overmind, if not even into the Supermind, just because some spiritual dawn-glimmer has touched their usually benighted heads. To have a frequent sense of the realms of Light above is good progress but it is different from being settled in any stratum of them or from receiving a constant downpour of God-gold from the strata nearest our mind. While writing this I recall four lines of mine summing up the overhead planes: (1) the Intuition as a general category of the immediate Overhead, (2) the Overmind as the crown of the spiritual adventure in general, (3) the Supermind as the Divine who is formative of all things and facing its own formations and (4) the Absolute that holds the source of the Supermind but is the sheer transcendent, the everlastingly world-free:

Streak on gold streak wounding the illusive night —

Miraculous monarchy of eagled gaze -

Page 66

Eternal truth's time-measuring sun-blaze -Lonely omnipotence locked in self-light.

Returning to the topic of "patience", I may recount to you an incident between Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Once, it appears, the Mother was animatedly pressing for the Ashram's progress. Sri Aurobindo expressed surprise at this change from the usual calm attitude towards her erring children. "Yes," the Mother said, "I am now impatient." Maybe some foreboding was there that extra demands might be made on her in the years to come (as actually happened after December 5, 1950 when Sri Aurobindo left his body) and she wanted something fundamental to be done before that

Sri Aurobindo himself seems to have shown impatience only about two months before his passing away. Nirod, his scribe, was taken aback when Sri Aurobindo said: "I want to finish Savitri soon." It was the very first occasion that the disciple, during his twelve years of attendance on the Master, had found him reckoning with the time-factor. On completing the somewhat intractable Book of Fate, Sri Aurobindo gave the impression of believing that he had done all that was immediately necessary. The Book of Death and the Epilogue were brought to his notice, but he set them aside, saving: "Oh, that? We shall see about that later on."

Perhaps impatience on his part may be read also in a letter he wrote to me in 1948. There he said that the situation had become too serious for him to have any time to waste on "intellectualities".

Why do you doubt my attitude to you? Of course you are very precious to me. Rarely does one find a soul with such trust, such openness, such concern. But this is only one side. The other side is the quality of the soul which is shown even more by its profound turn towards the Divine than by its capacity to have the trust, the openness, the concern relating to me.

(8.2.1987)

Page 67

Your poem -

That intense concern

Hid in poems and songs

Expressed in extended hands

ready to hold and lift,

In thoughts and prayers ready to reach

beseeching minds, |

n joys of silence and smiles of peace

ready to enrich aspiring hearts,

What happened?

Where did it go?

And when?-

your poem goes on finely up to the last three short lines. No doubt these express genuinely a life-situation but being true to actuality does not necessarily give poetic truth. Poetic truth has to be distilled from facts. Poetry is not satisfied by wondering what happened. What happened has itself to become wondrous or rather to reveal the core of surprise within its common existence. Perhaps, you should have said something like

What took it away

and left this empty searching stare?

I like what you say after mentioning your sense of boredom and aloneness which is partly relieved by painting: "Fun is still there as if interspersed like a few trees proclaiming spring amongst a forest in autumn." I think "fun" is the keynote of your nature as it is also of mine. The artist nature is always like that. But we must distinguish the artist from the aesthete. The aesthete depends on outward stimulus in order to feel happy. The artist has an inner fount which splashes everything with an iridescent spray and creates beauty or, more truly, washes off the surface of ordinariness from the world and lays bare the "crimson-throbbing glow"

Page 68

which is the world's heart. An artist can live amongst objects or circumstances that commonly would be considered unattractive and still be full of bubbling bliss. When he looks at a puddle he does not shrink like the aesthete from its apparent dirt but sees light reflected in it and feels that there must be light hidden in it to make it light-reflective. Lying in a gutter he would not be overpowered by the filth and the stink: he would be absorbed in all the clarity and colour he can watch in the sky above him and all the freshness he can intuit in the wide sweep of air across the open spaces there. Nothing can really depress him and everywhere he will discern some magical coming together of lines and shapes - some pattern bringing to him a shock of perfection in what the aesthete might regard as commonplace or chaotic.

Yes, the artist has a far deeper source of living and perceiving than the aesthete, but it is not yet the deepest. We may say he is like the Yogi who has realised the infinite beatific Brahman in all that exists, while the other fellow will mark Brahman springing forth in some areas and being depressingly absent from many spots. But even the aesthete character can have a contribution to make to the complete ideal we as Aurobindonians should keep before us. For there are two kinds possible of the other fellow: the selective and the creative. Ordinarily the aesthete picks out the beautiful and recoils from the ugly. The extraordinary aesthete would wish to change the ugly and refashion whatever does not answer to his quest for beauty. If the artist, who is impervious or oblivious to the broken and the disordered around him and lives in the light of his dream of the whole and harmonious, could add to his being the extraordinary aesthete's desire to transform the uncomely he would be more than a Shankarite seer of the Ananda Brahman and the overlooker of the phenomenal flawed universe: he would be the Aurobindonian visionary-cum-worker who not only knows that all this vast varied universe is basically nothing save Brahman but who also aims at transmuting into delightful beauty all the flaws, all the phenomenal short-

Page 69

comings that are still present in spite of his realisation with the Mundaka Upanishad that "the Eternal is before us and the Eternal is behind us and to the north and to the south of us and above and below and extended everywhere."

(4.4.1987)

Page 70